The increased use and reliance on microprocessor control systems for automotive vehicles and increased confidence in hydraulic as opposed to mechanical systems is making substantial progress in engine systems design possible. One such electrohydraulic system is a control for engine intake and exhaust valves. The enhancement of engine performance to be attained by being able to vary the timing, duration, lift and other parameters of the intake and exhaust valves' motion in an engine is known in the art. This allows one to account for various engine operating conditions through independent control of the engine valves in order to optimize engine performance. All this permits considerably greater flexibility in engine valve control than is possible with conventional cam-driven valvetrains.
One such system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,255,641 to Schechter (assigned to the assignee of this invention). A system disclosed therein employs a pair of solenoid valves per engine valve, one connected to a high pressure source of fluid and one connected to a low pressure source of fluid. They are used to control engine valve opening and closing. While this arrangement works adequately, the number of solenoid valves required per engine can be large. This is particularly true for multi-valve type engines that may have four or five valves per cylinder and six or eight cylinders. A desire arises, then, to reduce the number of valves needed in order to reduce the cost and complexity of the system. If each pair of solenoid vanes is replaced by a single actuator, then the number of valves is cut in half.
This same patent also discloses using rotary distributors to reduce the number of solenoid valves required per engine, but then employs an additional component rotating in relationship to the crankshaft to properly time the rotary distributors. This tie-in to the crankshaft may reduce some of the benefit of a camless valvetrain and, thus, may not be ideal. Further, the system still employs a separate solenoid valve for high pressure and low pressure sources of hydraulic fluid. A desire, then, exists to further reduce the number of valves controlling the high and low pressure sources of fluid from the hydraulic system.
One possible mechanism to accomplish this is to incorporate a rotary hydraulic actuator into the hydraulic system. One such system is disclosed in patent application Ser. No. 08/369,433, filed Jan. 6, 1995, (assigned to the assignee of this invention). The system disclosed in that patent application employs a rotary valve using external slots for routing the hydraulic fluid. A further desire exists to make any hydraulic actuator used as efficient as possible to reduce the power consumed by valve activation and the overall size of the system.